Alden Jones
PhD Candidate 2020-23
Alden Jones holds degrees in Comparative Literature, Hispanic Studies, and Creative Writing from Brown University, New York University, and Bennington College. She is the author, most recently, of the hybrid memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness. Her story collection, Unaccompanied Minors, won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Her memoir, The Blind Masseuse, was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award and named a top travel title of the year by Publishers Weekly, The Huffington Post, and A Traveler’s Library. Her stories and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Agni, Prairie Schooner, the Iowa Review, The Rumpus, The Believer, and the Best American Travel Writing. She is core faculty in the Newport MFA, and also teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College, where she was recognized with the Alan Stanzler Award for Excellence in Teaching.
praxis statement
As a writer of fiction and memoir, my praxis involves transforming material that is psychologically or emotionally unruly into a palatable story form. I am interested in the possibilities of structure and form to revolutionize life stories and imbue them with universal meaning.
research interest
We find ourselves in a time of global reckoning with regards to the way some voices and stories are amplified in literature (and all art forms), while other voices and stories are marginalized or silenced. Because the stories of the disenfranchised are often left untold, those with privilege are often in the dark about the ways in which global systems effect the people who labor to bring them the things they want or need. My fourth book, The Pleasure Seekers, will unpack how this dynamic has played out in the subculture of rave and dance club culture, yoga, and Buddhism as practiced in the West, particularly the United States and Cambodia. This project will make heavy use of interdisciplinary research into yoga, the international drug trade, the illegal harvesting of the Sassafras tree in the Cambodian rainforest, the birth of electronic music in Detroit, the way music and MDMA effect the brain, and cross-cultural understandings of “happiness.” Through the dramatized stories of characters from different national, racial, economic, and religious backgrounds, my research will enable to me to tell the story of this cultural collision from multiple points of view, with the ultimate goal of cross-cultural understanding.
The Wanting Was a Wilderness Book Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMubnQo8aV4